Shares of Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, tumbled to a new low Monday after the company was downgraded by another group of investment analysts—Wedbush’s this time. They cut shares from an “outperform” rating to a “neutral” rating, fixing a $36 target price on stocks and writing that “we see risks to Snap’s revenue growth targets stemming from IDFA headwinds, difficult comps from stellar growth in 2020-21, and increasing competition fr
While there’s no shortage of apps and extensions that can stop websites from snooping on you, StartPage’s new Chrome and Firefox extension is still worth a look. Once installed, the extension blocks third-party trackers and cookies from following you around the web. It also assigns a score to the current website—on a scale of one to five—based on how invasive it is. You can click on the extension’s icon to see the details for a given site, but otherwise the Sta
Like every seasoned tech writer, I have an embarrassing assortment of old iPhones and Android devices collecting dust around the house. Almost all are worth next to nothing by now, but the least-old ones of the bunch are prime candidates to be given second lives as . . . drumroll please . . . free wireless security cameras! Think about it: Cellphones have decent cameras. They connect to the internet. They can work for hours without being plugged in. Real cameras cost money. It’s a techno-
The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center has long focused on honoring the memory of people murdered during the Holocaust and preserving the stories of those who survived. Now a new pair of short virtual reality films telling the stories of two survivors will enable visitors to hear those stories while experiencing immersive visuals that help explain their experiences. One film, entitled A Promise Kept, tells the story of the late Frieda “Fritzie” Fritzshall, who was impri
Ever get annoyed by the intolerable reading experience on certain websites? By activating your browser’s reader mode, you can make web pages more reader-friendly by hiding ads, menus, pop-ups, and other distractions. Some web browsers even let you switch to reader mode automatically on specific websites. Here’s how: Safari: Long-press the “aA” icon in the address bar to activate reader mode. To load this mode by default on the current website, tap the icon again, then
Google has hired a key architect of Microsoft’s Hololens mixed reality glasses to work on its own “Project Iris” augmented reality glasses project. The hire, first reported by Road to VR‘s Scott Hayden, took place in November. That’s roughly the same time that Google decided to centralize its AR/VR development efforts under the roof of Google Labs (as reported by TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez). Kress’s title is Director of XR (mixed reality) Engineerin
Blockchain may be swimming into the mainstream with the force of a torpedo, but there are dams standing in the way. Among the biggest: its impact on the climate. Take a look at cryptocurrency mining, one of the most widely used consensus mechanisms for determining how blockchain ledgers are written. It’s a greenhouse gas giant that won’t stop growing. Calls to regulate the burgeoning industry are getting louder, and even Congress is listening. It held its first convenings on the to
Last week, when many Americans were waiting in long lines and scouring drugstores for COVID-19 tests due to the spread of the omicron variant, some Googlers were casually testing daily from the comfort of their own home. The device they use, a $249 machine that churns out PCR test results in 20 minutes, comes from a San Diego-based company called Cue Health. The company has been painted as providing COVID-19 testing for the elite, but Clint Sever, one of the company’s cofounders and its c
If you’ve ever wondered about the influence big tech wields in the Capital, you could literally hear it coming out of the mouths of lawmakers on Thursday, as members of the Senate Judiciary Committee met to mark up an antitrust bill that would prohibit marketplace and app store owners from self-preferencing their own products. The bill is Congress’s most serious attempt yet to reign in the power of big tech companies–mainly Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and—potenti
